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A short history of government digital strategies

If you were not weeping (rage/mirth/both) before reading it you will be afterwards:

http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/220/89/

What you might also have missed was this Wednesday's publication by two publicly funded bodies along with one of the large systems integrators (aka a third publicly funded body) of the output of a nine month study regarding public services and design.

Yes, you read that right IE 6.0

that old chestnut...

...as we explored the proof of concept tender exercise we stumbled across the legal but onerous change of licence for IE. IE now requires an MS Windows licence for each copy deployed. And why is that relevant? Because IE was a requirement for the bid (ActiveX anyone?)

It's difficult to imagine how an open source solution stood a snowflake in June's chance if every instance required an MS stack.

That's not MS's problem. That's a failure of the public sector to address the cost of lock-in.

"informal consultation"

As the official guidance on consultations says: "Clearly, if there is no scope for consultees to influence the policy, a formal consultation exercise should not be launched"

Note also that the survey resiles on the definition of open standards in the Cabinet Office procurement notice by calling the definition a "draft". Note also the use of the phrase "common standards" whatever they are. We deconstruct it here http://bit.ly/ifd7Yl

PJ

words, language, nuance

One of the big disappointments about Pamela Jones' decision to stop writing articles on Groklaw is that we will lose a big source of careful textual analysis so instead we will only have articles mixing and muddling the story.

So here we have some reasonable assertion mixed with quite a lot of "if" (If I were Prince William I'd be marrying Kate Middleton, but I'm not and I'm not) conjecture and emotive language.

So unnamed source say Google are giving priority to one set of chipmakers? What does that actually mean in practice? Was the unnamed source some bloke in the pub that makes it up as they go along? Does priority mean that chip maker A asked Google two weeks before chipmaker B and Google didn't say, I'm sorry I can't deal you with unitl chipmaker B is in the room? Does it mean that it didn't occur to chipmaker C to ask untl they heard about A&B and now they're kicking themselves and having to explain to someone else why they were asleep at the controls? I don't know either.

All parties involved appear to be big and ugly enough to look after themselves but we, as users, (e.g., possibly as eventual parties to a consumer supercomplaint against someone), need:

more analysis that clearly tells us whether there is going to more or less interoperability and more or less lock-in at the far end of all of this.

less conjecture framed as though we were discussing our favourite football teams

American Needle got there first

In that case, last June, the US Supremes handed down a ruling that collaborative exclusionary action by competing bodies could infringe the Sherman Act. (Competition Law) and now there's this. More here

If..

Do you have any evidence that training for OOo is anymore expensive than anything else?

"The Linux desktop is more confusing than the Windows one"

Do you make it up as you go along or do you have any evidence?

Just wondering because back in the day, relevantive did a study comparing Windows XP v openSUSE 8.2 (11.4 is soon to be released) for existing Windows (98?) users changing to a new system

http://www.relevantive.de/Linux-Usabilitystudy_e.html

They found several sources of quickly resolved confusion for example, once people worked out not all wordprocessing software were called "Word" completing the task became equivalent. In some instances worse, in others better.

It's not about techies rolling their own

As we have seen with FF, Chrome, whatever, people can and do choose not to use the market dominant incumbent.

The prevailing paradigm, computer = dominant incumbent = their software is how it all works, is the issue.

We saw how low a netbook could cost if it came with, e.g. Linpus,(my AAO is now on openSUSE 11.3, ta)

It could be lower hardware spec'ed (see "hardware manuf partially to blame..")

All of this causes deadweight cost to the consumer (allegedly)

All dominant incumbents can create this problem, others before them were, others after them will be in the same position

That's why we have competition law.

I hope this gets somewhere as it will do everybody a favour. After all look how much IE improved once there was real competition (I understand, never use it)

There's even something in this for penguin haters. If LOTD is as useless as _you_ say it is, then a win means there'll be one fewer reason for penguins to bleat (or whatever the correct onomatopoeic word is)

@Rolf

At a first cut you might have a point. However, let me continue your example a little further.

Let's suppose a large software producer donates (or sells at a cheap price) software to a charity. Great, so far no problem.

However let's suppose that charity starts issuing press releases saying "lucky us we have a great relationship with this software company, look they've done us a deal, good old software company"

Now, the software company is getting paid in reflected goodwill - how much is worth to them?

And did the people that choose to support that charity want that goodwill to be consumed in that way?

And what is the real cost to the charity?

Then of course there's the client group: apparently, it turns out there's something they get that only works with that software company's product. And it is costing them money time and inconvenience. So what are the real and other costs there?

Then there's the competitive disadvantage experienced by other software companies. What's the cost to society there?

You might well think I'm using a real example - it doesn't matter whether that's true or not. It's the abstract point.

(Apparently) there's an Urdu expression "do your charity and throw it in the river" which I take to mean her, that said software company could have asked their products be treated as white label and sought no publicity - even used open standards, but that wouldn't have been sensible for a profit maximising entity.

Is that the same as JCB refurbishing a life at RFH and Southbank centre painting it yellow in thanks? Personally I don't think so, as JCB don't make lifts and it doesn't displace (ho-ho) other lift installations.

Ars comments look a bit susicious too

Read/scanned a couple of pages of them, so level toned, so matter-of-fact, so uniformly anti-OOo and disparaging of Linux (where mentioned) they look like they were written by the same person in diffent phases of their life: student, SME, business owner etc.,

Consider i4I as the general case "SME with a patent"

Yes, it's a software patent, but in the USA system it's been tested and found to be valid.

No doubt i4i have spent a few quid getting this far but look, every annoyed megacorp is spending shed loads in legal fees to avoid i4i collecting.

Imagine if the situation were reversed (can anyone hear the beating of a Tom-Tom drum?) and the company cannot spend shed loads to prevent megacorp collecting and so has to capitulate.

So for an SME they might as well publish rather than patent, except that if megacorp were to then patent the same idea the SME would find itself in the same hole.

This is true of all patents not just software patents (which are a specific kind of rubbish) so perhaps a legal beagle could explain why the patent system is good for innovation and not a merely a system to support economic hegemony?

Govt approach follows that from ID cards

In that ruling govt feared that companies would not want their commercial confidentiality breached - and companies responded by indicating they had a fair idea of each others' prices already so, no, they didn't care.

Here Atos confirmed this. So Cabinet Office gave some excuse about the nature of the contract.

So really, was it all about govt (mis)management of bidding and IT expenditure?

And has it changed under the new administration? (don't know, just wondering)

And, changing the topic, will someone remind me how the government gateway does authentication? surely it's registration at best?

Tricky, this one...

PDF is an ISO format that is actually used. And Adobe made that happen.

I'm sort of there with Lee, in that a better target would be to get governments to use ISO formats only, the get out of jail card for Microsoft is 29500 transitional (.doc to you and me) and certainly not .docx which is not 29500 compliant.

OTOH in general terms, governments should not be promoting one company's product over another.

I use Okular, a universal document reader, but then I use KDE. It would be possible, I imagine, for governments to bundle that with the necessary libraries so it installed on MS Windows or Apple. They wouldn't even need to call it Okular.

But given that Adobe Reader is freely available for all OSes, it's hardly a barrier to people exploring an alternative OS to the incumbent. (and then discovering Okular, or the Gnome equivalent, or all the other ones)

"Each OS has its merits and faults dependent on the application for which it is used"

non-popperian - the statement is unfalsifiable thus generally considered to be content-free. In what way, do you think, Linux is an issue in these circumstances? In which ways, do you think, it is advantageous?

"I have used a fair few of them for the past 25 years from MS-DOS 2.11 on through various flavours of Unix, Windows, OS/400 and MAC/OS - so I think I know what I'm talking about."

That might or might not be true but we don't know because you don't tell us, you merely assert that <statement A> gives you authority to make <statement B>

More examples here: http://queinnec.perso.enseeiht.fr/proof.html

I would conclude that your comment contains less information that Herby's but there you go.

new definition of freetard required

Users of Free and Open Source Software might not like paying money for the stuff, but many of them end up helping out in some way, even if only bug reporting or sharing experience.

It's amusing to read all these posts boasting how they are going to steal from Microsoft. The one I really liked was the proposal to renew the enterprise agreement just to avoid paying for a personal copy.

Now is usually always.a bad time to do anything. Kicking any addiction is painful in the short term but always better in the long run.

It would be nice...

... to never have to encounter the unpaid(?) hordes that cannot wait to tell us how great Ubuntu is or how they really like Gnome.

As the first post mentions 1-click install does what it says on the tin.

On my spare machine I'm currently using openSUSE 11.3 and yes the repros are not ready yet, but yes for the first time ever my MSI mega book worked (Realtek wi-fi) on install without any fiddling around. I'm also using and liking KDE SC 4.5 RC1. BTW did I mention that KOffice 2.2 is now good to go?

I have no idea what any other distro is like, I've been there since S.u.S.E 6.1 and it's all been fine for me. Everything is getting better and slicker - no doubt across the entire distrowatch spectrum.